Russia needs strategic oil storage facilities to help its oil industry and oil trade with the Western sanctions, Russian experts and industry officials say. “As of today, it is necessary, based on Soviet and world experience, to consider the possibility of creating oil reservoirs with a volume of about 140 million tons and similar ones for petroleum products,” according to an English translation by Interfax of an article by Gennady Shmal, head of the Union of Oil and Gas Producers, and Rishat Shagislamov, project director of a department at the Russian energy ministry. “In terms of organization and technologically, this should be a distributed system tied to transport infrastructure and using the method of storage in rock salt deposits,” the Russian industry experts say. Lack of oil storage was a big hurdle to Russia’s oil exports in the first weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when buyers started […]